FiveThirtyEight, the influential political data site first launched by stats guru Nate Silver in 2008, is being shut down amid sweeping layoffs being enacted by Disney across ABC News and Disney Entertainment Networks, a source familiar with the matter told The Independent.
Additionally, all three hours of programs branded under the news network’s flagship morning talk show Good Morning America have been consolidated under one leader, GMA executive producer Simone Swink. Previously, the third hour — known as GMA3 — ran under a separate production team headed by executive producer Catherine McKenzie, who has been let go along with much of the GMA3 staff. The gutting of the third hour’s staff — as well as other deep cuts across the newsroom — have left many ABC News employees shaken and concerned.
“It's a very somber scene in the building—people crying and upset,” a network staffer told Status News’ Oliver Darcy. “Lots of panicked phone calls between staffers trying to make sense of it.”
The job cuts, which were announced to staff on Wednesday, will impact roughly 200 employees and represent about six percent of the total workforce across ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks. The majority of the layoffs are at ABC News, with most impacted employees based in New York.
Representatives for ABC News and Disney declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal and Status News first reported on the looming layoffs.
Besides the shuttering of FiveThirtyEight, which will result in the elimination of about 15 jobs across the news site, ABC is also consolidating some of its other programming that will lead to reduced staff. The news magazine shows 20/20 and Nightline, along with other long-form programming, will now fall under one leadership unit. The shows first aired in 1978 and 1980, respectively.
Besides the shuttering of FiveThirtyEight and GMA3 being “entirely gutted,” the company also got rid of investigations team executive producer Cindy Galli and Zach Toback, vice president of news and non-fiction production and studio operations at ABC News who had been a mainstay at the network. Notably, Toback was let go after helping move the company over to its new New York City headquarters at the Robert A. Iger building.
“It’s a massacre,” an ABC News employee told Darcy, while another staffer compared the dire situation at the network to the dystopian Netflix series Squid Game.
“You just feel like you've made it to level seven of 'Squid Games' at this point if you've survived,” the employees stated. “I've actually thought of this a lot," the person said. "I don't know if you have watched 'Squid Game,' but they put you in teams and they pit you against each other. And then they just watch and it's brutal. And then even the people who win the prize in the end ... they're so unhappy. That is literally network TV.”
Even in his own memo to staff about the layoffs, network president Almin Karamehmedovic described the situation as “incredibly challenging” and said it would “undoubtedly be difficult for our organization.” At the same time, while informing the FiveThirtyEight staff of the site’s demise and the loss of their jobs, Karamehmedovic had no explanation for why the site was being shut down and appeared to be reading from a script. Within minutes of the meeting, the website was pulled down and the staffers had their access revoked.
While the company will be winding down the FiveThirtyEight brand, ABC News is expected to continue to provide “best-in-class polling and political data analysis” across the network, a source noted. Whether this means retaining editorial director of data analytics G. Elliott Morris, who currently leads FiveThirtyEight, remains to be seen. It also isn’t clear just yet what will happen with 538’s extensive trove of data.
“As reported, the entire staff of 538 was laid off this morning,” Morris posted on Wednesday morning. “This is a severe blow to political data journalism, and I feel for my colleagues. Readers note: As we were instructed not to publish any new content, all planned updates to polls data and averages are canceled indefinitely. Huge loss :(”
Morris, for his part, further reacted to the news by praising the site’s data collection as “game-changing” and expressing hope that “it gets a rebirth.” He added that it “would need a modest budget for 2-3 researchers and 1-2 engineers.” He also noted that AI has “made things easier” now, but that ABC News had forbidden the data site from using it in the past.
Many journalists, meanwhile, have already been bemoaning the shuttering of the pivotal election data site. The 19th’s Grace Panetta reacted by calling it a “catastrophic loss not only for election journalism but also as an election data resource,” adding that she couldn’t “even count the number of times I've relied on 538's polling averages, redistricting trackers, etc for my reporting.”
Former FiveThirtyEight reporter Kayleigh Rogers noted that “538's open source API and all the other data we/they freely compiled and shared over the years drove so much important work across the industry,” adding that “this is going to have pretty severe ripple effects.”
Silver also expressed heartbreak over his brainchild’s imminent demise. (Silver departed the site amid previous widespread Disney/ABC layoffs in 2023.) “Oh geez, I just saw the news about 538,” he tweeted Tuesday night. “My heart goes out to the people there. They were tremendously hard-working and produced a lot of extremely valuable data and insight for everyone who wants to understand politics better. They deserved much better.”
Disney Entertainment Networks, which includes Disney Channel, FX and Freeform, is also expected to lose staff from its planning and scheduling teams, though the precise figure was not immediately clear. Disney’s digital editorial and social teams are set to be integrated with news gathering, shows and ABC-owned stations.
The latest wave of staff cuts comes as the entertainment giant wrangles with declining television ratings and revenues over recent years, with audiences — and advertisers — opting to move to streaming platforms.
Time spent on streaming platforms surged to more than 40 percent, with cable and broadcast plummeting to about 27 and 21 percent respectively, according to a Nielsen report published last summer.
Media giants are reshaping their business strategies in response to the continued migration. CNN, for instance, recently laid off six percent of its staff as it looks to pivot to a digital-first strategy. Amid a programming overhaul, MSNBC announced that roughly 100 employees would be impacted, though the network said the laid-off staffers could apply for new jobs that would soon be opening across the network. Paramount, the parent company of CBS, is in the midst of laying off as much as 15 percent of its U.S. workforce.
Like many entertainment businesses, Disney is looking for ways to trim costs on more traditional content — such as news programming — and increase spending on sports and entertainment.
It follows 75 employees being laid off by ABC News and ABC-owned stations in October last year to reshape its team to “embrace the new media landscape,” Almin Karamehmedovic, president of ABC News, wrote in a memo.
A month earlier, Disney axed about 300 employees from corporate departments as it looked to redistribute its resources to “fuel the state-of-the-art creativity,” a company representative said in a statement to Variety in September.
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